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The Misfits

Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, University of Nevada-Reno Library.

A panoramic view of Dayton, Nevada, most likely in the 1960s or 1970s. At this time, Dayton’s heyday as a milling and commercial center for nearby Virginia City was long gone, and it would be another couple of decades before the town would undergo explosive growth as a suburban bedroom community for nearby Carson City. In the early 1960s, though, the town gained some notoriety as the setting for the John Huston film, The Misfits, starring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe.

The story of The Misfits (1961) was conceived when playwright Arthur Miller waited out his own divorce in Nevada and was impressed by the way the region's isolation and alienation affect and reflect its residents. He also saw a means of providing a suitable but challenging screen role for the woman he was planning to marry, Marilyn Monroe. The project drew director John Huston plus actors Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and Kevin McCarthy, who arrived in Reno to what the San Francisco Chronicle reported as "gape jawed movie fans stacked twelve deep along the sidewalks in front of Harrah's Club in Reno."

The project was shot in sequence on existing locations including Harrah's in Reno and the former Mia's in Dayton. The stunning finale used a dry lakebed off Highway 50 near Stagecoach, now known as Misfits Flat. The sequence shows director John Huston's trademark skill with rugged location work, contributing to the film's eventual ranking as a classic. Horses running wild on an expanse of flat desert emphasize all the characters' fear of being reigned in as the Old West loses ground, though instead of herding horses for ranch and rodeo use, the cowboys sell them to the meat industry. The wild mustang, a classic symbol of the free West, has become dog food. Catching horses, says Gay, is "like ropin' a dream now."

Though the movie was a box-office disappointment, it has developed a mystique as the last completed film by Gable and Monroe. It has been listed in the National Film Registry, formed by Congress to preserve films deemed "culturally, historically, or esthetically important." The movie inspired a documentary, The Making of the Misfits, for PBS.

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